164 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 165 duction of immediate life. This again, is of a twofold character: le habits and degree of comfort in which labourers has been formed. In contradistinction n the one hand, the production of the means of existence, of Ise of other commodities, there enters into the food, clothing, and shelter and the tools necessary for that pro- the value of labour- power a historical and moral element rction; on the other side, the production of hunman beings (hei (Marx, 1972: 171, my italics) elves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a It is precisely this "historical and moral element" which live is determined by both kinds of pro determines that a wife"is among the necessities of a duction: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand orker that women rather than men do housework, and that and of the family on the other..(Engels, 1972: 71-72; my Ladies) apitalism is heir to a long tradition in which women do not inherit, in which women do not lead, and in which women do This passage indicates an important recognition-that a ot talk to god. It is this "historical and moral element' human group must do more than apply its activity to reshap- which presented capitalism with a cultural heritage of forn ing the natural world in order to clothe, feed, and warm of masculinity and femininity. It is within this"historical ar itself. We usually call the system by which elements of the moral element"'that the entire domain of sex, sexuality, and natural world are transformed into objects of human con sex oppression is subsumed. And the briefness of Marx's com umption the"economy. " But the needs which are satisfied ment only serves to emphasize the vast area of social life by economic activity even in the richest, Marxian sense, de which it covers and leaves unexamined. Only by subjecting not exhaust fundamental human requirements. A human this "historical and moral element"'to analysis can the struc group must also reproduce itself from generation to genera ture of sex oppression be delineated tion. The needs of sexuality- and procreation must be satisfied much as the need to eat, and one of the most obvious deductions which can be made from the data of anthro. pology is that these needs are hardly ever satisfied in any In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the natural"form, any more than are the needs for food State, Engels sees sex oppression as part of capitalism's heri Hunger is hunger, but what counts as food is culturally deter tage from prior social forms. Moreover, Engels integrates sex mined and obtained. Every society has some form of orgar and sexuality into his theory of society. Origin is a frustrating zed economic activity. Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is ook. Like the nineteenth-century tomes on the history qually culturally determined and obtained. Every society marriage and the family which it echoes, the state of the also has a sex/gender system -a set of arrangements by which evidence in Origin renders it quaint to a reader familiar with the biological raw material of human sex and procreation more recent developments in anthropology. Nevertheless, it is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a con- a book whose considerable insight should not be over ventional manner no matter how bizarre some of the conven- shadowed by its limitations. The idea that the relations of tions may be s n and should be distinguished from the "rela- tions of production"is not the least of Engels'intuitions According to the materialistic conception, the determining fac- demonstrates the point that sexuality is expressed through tor in history is, in the final instance, the production and repro vention of culture (see Ford and Beach, 1972). Some exam chosen from among the exotica in which anthropologist